The Functioning Of Memory In The Process Of Discourse Comprehension

Discourse comprehension is one of the major research targets for discourse analysts. However, it remains a comparatively less explored area in China despite the great achievements in other areas of discourse study. Since discourse comprehension is by nature an active and highly complicated process of cognition, a process in which memory functions at all level, we must make full use of theories of memory to help study discourse comprehension. The present paper attempts to explore discourse comprehension from a psycholinguistic perspective, borrowing current theories of working memory and findings of experiments in memory studies. It is put forward in this paper that traditional theories of working memory, which are based on the test of subjects' memory for either digits or meaningless non-sense words, fail to explain the highly complicated process of discourse comprehension because the surprising number of components of the memory system involved in discourse comprehension is far beyond the limited capacity of working memory. The theory of long-term working memory, on the other hand, gives us a more possible description of the functioning of memory in discourse comprehension. The present paper analyzes the theory of long-term working memory and designs an experiment to verify the hypothesis of long-term working memory by testing whether some interruptions during the processing of a discourse will impair the overall comprehension of that discourse and eventually affect the memory for it. The findings of the experiment indicate that discourse comprehension will not be significantly impaired by a certain amount of interruptions and thus confirm the hypothesis of the existence of long-term working memory.